Marcelle Nerien worked for a reputable auction house in Manhattan. I met her during a trip to Paris, where I watched her stalk and eventually kill a Citroen Luxury Sedan with such power and grace that the assault stands in my memory as "the most beautiful and terrible experience of my early twenties." She built a reputation in New Orleans as a gallery director, but now commanded a crack team of art inspectors working to identify and recover pieces stolen during various Nazi occupations. Ostensibly, the team’s goal was to return the items to their rightful owners, formerly wealthy Jewish families living in the united states and abroad, but enough of the pieces were found to belong to defunct lines and indeterminate surnames now living in Paraguay that supplemental income from illicit sales was available to anyone on her team who cared for that sort of exchange.

Her first appraisal was a highly publicized identification of a series of ceramic figurines—12 jolly fellows (ostensibly Hummel) performing the Stations of the Cross. Closer inspection revealed two important facts. First, the figures were not valuable individually, despite the fact that they also showed the 12 progressive stages of MultiPox, a medieval bacterial/viral combo disease that proved so virulent that it was unable to survive when exposed to itself. Second, the figures were infinitely less important than the box in which they had been packed. Inside each of the six surrounding panels was a plate of the Salvador Dali Sextych “Portraits of Cervantes’ Quixote.” The catalan polymath, Dali', had formed a cube of brass plates about a case of gunpowder and shrapnel (consisting of crushed rhino horn, ink, bread, and cuneiform tablets). After detonating the device from a safe distance (he was in Paris at the time, unaware of his own project. The device was activated by a mercury tilt-trigger designed to respond to Dali’s eventual loss of interest in the piece.) the tattered remains of the cube’s faces became the portraits of La Mancha’s favorite demiknight.

The 12 aching gentlemen were useful, however, in tracking the course of the six plates out of Europe and into the U.S. The bronze-plated bin had been smuggled out of France by an SS officer in 1938 posing as a baker specializing in novelty breads. He was able to pass through customs by declaring his newest creation, “A Rye Loaf in the shape of a brass plate sextych depicting various scenes from the Quixote.” [Further research by my friend and her staff has since linked this uberbakker to a number of stolen pieces: